Watch the video of what Chelsea Flower Show judges, Michael Balston and Jill Billington, made of Ann Treneman's "real" garden.

Looking back, I was a bit of a fool. Two Chelsea judges were coming to have a look at my garden and I had prepared by doing almost nothing. True, the weekend before, in their honour, I had taken the discarded Christmas tree to the dump. Plus I had cut the grass. But I had done little else because life is too short to clean up for the cleaner or, in this case, to garden for the gardeners. I now see this was insouciance bordering on idiocy.

"You've got your washing out," noted Jill Billington as she arrived at my front door with fellow judge Michael Balston. Did I? I panicked. What washing? How could I have missed that?

Well, I noted in what may have been a slightly defensive tone, at least there is no cat crap. Only minutes before, I had done a sweep of my garden, nose and eyes on high alert. "Cats and crap, that could be the title of the garden," said Jill. I laughed, for it was funny. Or, more accurately, I could see it would have been funny if it hadn't been about my garden.

The idea had been to have two Chelsea judges come to see a real garden. I love to garden, though admittedly in a haphazard way that suits the fact that I work full-time (as sketchwriter for The Times). I live in suburbia, in an Edwardian house surrounded on three sides by a walled wraparound garden. On two sides, the garden is really just a grassy walkway flanked by skinny beds and a few flowering trees. At the back, there is a largish patio (with herb beds), a grassy area and a large shady bed. I am filling this with plants associated with the heart, such as foxglove (ie, digitalis), heartsease, bleeding heart. Yes, I know, it sounds naff, but it doesn't look naff and I like it. There is a winter-flowering cherry in the corner. It gives me great pleasure to see its delicate pink flowers on a grey day. In fact, a great many things in my garden give me pleasure but now, in one of those lightning flashes of insight that I try to avoid, I could see that my garden was too real for this experiment. And, even before the thunderclap, I could see that Jill and Michael also knew this. But we carried on, because this is England and that's what you do in these circumstances.

We sat around my dining table (looking out on the magnolia, which was in flower but didn't garner much comment) and they explained the Chelsea judging process to me. It took an hour. An hour. The time and painstaking effort devoted to the process is immense and all aimed at making it fair and balanced. There are four stages, starting with selection of plans and ending with the final judging. Gardens are awarded points out of 100 based on the following criteria: the brief (15 points), overall impression (20), overall design (20), construction (15) and planting (30). I really didn't want to even think how many points I would get and I don't think they did either.

We were all trying to make the best of this. "A show garden is one which is polished up to the bloody eyeballs in order to be looking good, whereas a real garden has got places for cats and crap," said Michael. (And bins, I thought. And compost. And weeds. And broken pots. And washing.)

The key to making a garden work is to use the space and, by that, Jill and Michael mean all three dimensions. Jill, in particular, is attuned to atmosphere. "You have a romantic approach, which is not a put-down because, actually, I'm a romantic too. It's quite clear that you want it to look slightly messy and even if you had tidied it up for us, it would look a bit dishevelled. The word 'natural' keeps appearing."

Michael looks out at my grass/moss walkway, fringed with bluebells. "If this was my garden," he says, "I would forget about the grass completely."

"Would you?"

"Yes, well, just look at it!" We looked at it. No further comment was made."You could have paving stones going through it and plant right between them and up to them."

Jill suggested paving squares and interplanting for a "cottagey" feel. "It's a fussy detail but then this is a small garden and you are wanting a very fussy garden, really."

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